Issue 18: James Coghill
Derelictions
1
Strafed the city with iron /
it’s good / all this new growth the flowering of ampules
their attendant scaffolds /
labourers dressed in nothing
but lime, water, rust
made a tomb for air / now / let murder roam around here instead
the scrubbed out faces in old photographs
indicating loss of faith / mortal sins / suicides
when they sunk steel into the murk
and came up with bones who could blame them?
Walk down Cowgate and you’ll trample the trampling
two-laned livestock lowing / pat the trodden finger-bones
crushed at the cemetery’s terminal edge /
uprooted / up /
into the newest of air /
the Crescent bridge setting down / the men here / the women
doing everything but
and even the animals appreciate a path
floating above the railway line that soot bleeding vein
that vital ligature in nation’s cramped-up muscle /
even the animals appreciate / pre-sale and slaughter
and the bones shout through the men
who find them / unspellable variations, or sometimes nothing
but the disarmingly sheared joint of innocence,
or, said another way: Oh.
2
The medium who works at asda
the medium everyone knows who works at asda —
the medium with all those dogs who everyone knows who works at asda
holds me by the upper arms and imparts his knowledge:
Queensgate, haunted by the old caretaker—
by me, I laugh, hauling rubbish from bin to bin to landfill
down stairwells marked with tiny hand-prints / — and his daughter
the light squirming under the fire exit / so run from everything
antelope skittering on cobbles / cats hysterical with acid
away from that multi-story named / in dubious honour /
of John Clare /who scrapes his fingers
across the ingrown /
do something and do something now /
when he tried to change the change that was rewriting his world
to alterity
and broke down spiritually and financially simultaneously,
finding them one and the same:
tense horror / they
told the men dig it deep, fill in the graves, the memory of graves,
and then the very thought of graves /
this world of concrete, our roots have bridled / touch nothing.
3
The children of the 60s are at home here
and never learn their lesson / a monopoly on hope /
and the slice of house I rent / while the tower block Peregrines
mistake Fitzleet for the tarpeian rock / dive like an endless
stream of bodies with (self) murdering immediacy / there are
people here who never leave this place
and a vanguard for the new slavophobia / because
we like Indian food now after that struggle
uncanny when voiced aloud now, my neighbours, try
to hide your wince
when they put the boot in and scramble our prospects /
their hypocrisy is showing and I’m
out for want of something new / out of everything,
anything but the same
wake up and struggle to climb all this
shingle / burn the fort down when all it needed
was a lick of paint / I dreamt
I took the whole country abroad / it went better than I expected
even when asked to pick potatoes / drink anise /
confront their ancestry /
but I’m still waiting for my first roots to nurture
in this uprooted world Weil predicts will slaughter and slaughter
even the populace of Bognor, or
Bucgan Ora who forget their town
is named after a foreign woman constantly unfailingly.
4
Put armour on him and Jonah Snell’s a soldier
be dubious
like the Norman knight who first looked up at Ferneham
and thought ‘what a shithole’ whose footsteps
I unwittingly stood in — between the mall’s plush feculence
and the magnetic pull of the bus station, let’s
get out of here
it says as Tommy Walsh leers out from Poundland
and my sudden need for power tools is overtaken
with a need to stare, as if to watch was all I was made for;
my witness squirmingly askance under the gaze
of another’s nostalgia for a different age. Some billionaire
has trapped this place in a different time
I thought in blind panic, waiting to hear that JFK had been shot
a second time and that the new MP for my grandparents’
constituency was this young woman called Thatcher —
fancy that
St Irenaeus of Lyons, I’m terrified time ended when your Christ
walked the planet
and is fated to repeat until His return wipes
each and every eschatology from the straining eye
of our haggard intelligences
that still expect a love, despite everything,
that rises up through the cracks left by this age-old despair in remission
rise up like the interminable self-knowledge
of these market towns and all their fleshy ghosts—
how aware of their own dereliction.
James Coghill is an ecopoet with an abiding interest in lyric sequences, Swedish culture, and animal studies. He has had poems published in The Rialto, Lighthouse, and in anthologies from Sidekick Books. Currently residing in Greenwich, he sometimes blogs here: thesolenette.wordpress.com.
